With Halloween and the election approaching, it's not just those things that may have the average American worried about their own jobs.Lightreading reports that two major U.S. carriers, Verizon and AT&T, have recently reported more layoffs. From July through September, Verizon's workforce was reduced by 2,700 for a total of 101,200 employees, while AT&T reduced its workforce by 2,400 over the same period for a total of 143,600 more. In fact for the past 10 years or so, telecom carriers in the U.S. have been laying off employees. in 2015, AT&T and Verizon still had a combined workforce of 459,150, and have lost 214,350 jobs between then and now, almost a fraction of that. The reduction in staff is not due to a decline in business. in 2015, the two companies' sales to total $278.4 billion, compared to $256.4 billion last year. The decline was largely brought on by reduced performance at AT&T. AT&T's revenue of $122.4 billion last year was 16 percent less than in 2015, but sales per capita grew from $520,000 to $813,000 over the same period. verizon's sales per capita increased even more, from $741,000 to $1.27 million. Their only real competitor in the U.S. market during the same period was T-Mobile.The decline in AT&T and Verizon's employee counts was partly due to their exits from businesses such as Time Warner, which AT&T acquired, and Verizon's exits from AOL and Yahoo. I remember when editors once commented that AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner was akin to China Mobile's Migu Video, and that partnerships between telecom carriers and media were once popular at the beginning of the 21st century. But the carriers' diversification efforts proved to be a failure.

While staffing has been cut in half, AT&T's and Verizon's revenues have not. What does this mean? First the original jobs didn't require as many people, and second, the remaining employees took on more work. Perhaps the title of a best-selling book explains quite a bit about this. in 2013, David Graeber, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, published his book Bullshit Jobs, which points out that millions of people in American society - human resources consultants, communications coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers - whose jobs are useless, and unfortunately, they know it. These people are stuck in bullshit jobs. Keynes predicted in the 1930s that by the end of the 20th century, technology would have advanced enough that people's work weeks would be reduced to 15 hours. But today, people are spending more time at work simply because of the sheer number of bullshit jobs. the LR article says that big carriers are reducing their workforce also because of current network automation, digitization, and AI-ization. Current technologies such as ChatGPT do reduce a lot of the traditional workload, such as preparing drafts of marketing programs. What's more, networks are becoming increasingly automated. Not surprisingly, future telecom networks will be automated in the same way as driverless cars. The current development of 5G networks already employs a number of network automation techniques.

A recent article in 36Krypton said that Chinese carriers are expected to find a second growth curve through the network+cloud route, compared to the US carriers that are laying off employees. The article said, “In the past decade, Chinese carriers have taken the lead in upgrading from ‘network’ carriers to ‘network+cloud’ carriers, opening up a ‘second growth curve’. In the past decade, Chinese operators were the first to upgrade from “network” operators to “network+cloud” operators, opening up a “second growth curve” and enjoying a “unique landscape” when the global telecom industry as a whole was weak. Now, it's time to turn the corner again, operators must upgrade from “network + cloud computing” operators to “network + cloud computing + AI” operators, Chinese operators have a good foundation, but also face considerable difficulties, such as arithmetic infrastructure operation, large technical and commercial challenges, large scale computing infrastructure operation, and the need for a new generation of operators. There are big technical and commercial challenges, and the big model business closed loop needs to be established urgently, and so on.” But the picture may not be so rosy. Looking at the staffing changes of China's three major carriers from the 2023 and 2022 annual report data, China Mobile's total number of employees increased from 450,698 to 451,830; China Telecom reduced its workforce from 280,683 to 269,926, with a larger layoff; and China Unicom reduced its workforce from 244,508 to 242,891, with a small reduction in staffing as well. In addition, news of layoffs at China's three major carriers has been circulating in the industry since the beginning of this year. China should not be an exception to the general trend of transformational layoffs by global telecom operators. First of all, China's state-owned telecom operators should also have a lot of Bullshit jobs. Second, regarding the cloud computing business, a friend from China Telecom once told an editor that the fact that U.S. carriers are divesting their cloud computing businesses while Chinese carriers are strengthening them is actually behind their respective business strategies, and it's not a matter of U.S. carriers abandoning their second growth curve. The impact of cloud and AI on telecom business is long-term, and the traditional telecom operator model must face a shift. For optical communication operators, this is also very worth observing.